Creating a reading cave with BEAR & Puffin’s Big Book Club

Isla and Noah received a fabulous kit from BEAR, it included: A Big Book Club cushion, fabulous books to read, a ‘reading cave’ sign and ideas on creating a bear cave for the kiddies to sit and read their books. It was just what we needed on a rainy day.

Creating our BEAR reading cave

We had lots of fun setting up our cave. We grabbed our “indoor camp kit”: a bag full of pegs, string and a big sheet. I used a broom stick and created a kind of teepee shape within a few minutes. I pushed the footstool into the cave, so they could sit in comfort, padded the cushion, blankets and the children grabbed their favourite soft toys.

They absolutely loved it. Isla sat and read the entire book to us. Isla’s book is “Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?”. It’s such a fun book and all about bears too. The repetition in the book helped her to work out what the next page was going to say and before the end she had a good rhythm going. She was so excited and was even reading to her brother. The pride in her expression made me feel so happy.

Noah had another book to read, “DOGGER”. He really enjoyed reading this. It had some tricky words in it, but it was nice to see him working them out. It gave us time together which we do not often get. I really enjoyed it. We talked about Dave losing his favourite toy too, as Noah loses a lot of his toys, so, it gave me something to relate to with Noah. It worked too, we talked about how Dave felt when he lost Dogger.

We now create our reading cave whenever it is raining and we are at home. The children love it. They even slept in it recently! We turned it into a reading cave/camp.

Even the dog joined in…

Reading free book extracts online

You can read all about BEAR & Puffin’s Big Book Club here. I love the cute little animation when you go to the page showing you how Puffin and BEAR started their collaboration. You can then scroll through the forest with Bear and Puffin to discover extracts from amazing books. To unlock the extract the children have to work out an anagram, for example the D book anagram is RDUM. Then we were given an extract of a Diary of a Wimpy kid book. The children loved exploring the site.

Whilst looking online at the free book extracts, the children had a bowl of Alphabites without milk, they ate them like a little snack. They enjoy them like that or with milk as cereal for breakfast. Alphabites are a great snack as they have no refined sugars or other added nonsense. Alphabites can be found in Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Morrisons, Waitrose and Co-Op.

We love working with BEAR, we had a lot of fun over the Summer! They have some great ideas on how to engage with the children and get them eating healthily at the same time. Win-Win from a parenting perspective! #BigBookClub @BearNibbles @Puffinbooks